The Honor 600 Pro is a flagship-lite dynamo that tries to please everyone – and succeeds in many ways – but only if the price is right

The Chinese smartphone manufacturer Honor has thoroughly impressed with its selection of smartphones this year – with the Honor Magic8 Pro taking the fight to Samsung and the Honor 600 presenting a brilliant proposition as a mid-range device.

Rather awkwardly sitting somewhere in between these two handsets is the Honor 600 Pro. It's a more affordable alternative to the flagship-class Magic8 Pro (with some admittedly hefty compromises) but still retains plenty of "pro" features to keep businesses interested.

With an £899 price tag, however, many will question whether it offers value for money when you may choose to either go all-out for the most expensive Honor device or save on a few hundred pounds and settle for something a little lighter in nature.

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Honor 600 Pro: Design

Parallels in the design of the Honor 600 Series with the iPhone 17 Pro are unavoidable. You can immediately notice the same protruding translucent rear panelling (housing the camera lenses and sensors) as well as the brushed metallic sides with etched grooves.

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They even share the same shouty orange primary finish, but we picked up an Honor 600 Pro draped in a sophisticated Golden White coating, which looks clean and sophisticated in its own right. You can also pick up the device in a more generic but safer Black look. The composite fiber material on the phone's rear adds to its premium quality with some much-needed friction while you're holding it, and it's incredibly well constructed overall.

This phone is slightly smaller than the Honor 400 Pro (its predecessor) with a 6.57-inch display versus a 6.7-inch panel; in fact, it uses almost the same shell as the Honor 600 (except a third lens here). With a weight of 195g, it's also one of the lightest devices in this category – and one of the most compact too, thanks to its 7.8mm thickness.

Like the Honor 600, the left-hand side panel features several physical function keys, including volume controls, a power/Gemini button, and the Honor AI button. As with both devices, the display also features rounded corners that taper off far too aggressively, somewhat undermining the large real estate you'd otherwise enjoy.

Like the Honor Magic8 Pro, the device also boasts IP68/IP69/IP69K for dust and water resistance, with the latter certification a new category that means total dust-tightness with protection against pressure and high-temperature water jets. This comes in addition to an SGS 5-Star drop resistance. Hard to think, but this slender device is perhaps one of the most robust you can find right now.

Honor 600 Pro: Display

There's plenty of strength in the Honor 600 Pro's 6.57in AMOLED display – but it's the exact same panel as that used in the Honor 600. Thankfully, it's a good one, with a 2,728 x 1,264-pixel resolution equating to a solid 458 pixels-per-inch (slightly better than the Magic8 Pro) and a super smooth 120Hz refresh rate. There's also basic HDR support, although you're missing advanced standards like HDR10+ or Dolby Vision.

Honor lets you pick from three distinct color profiles that include normal (true-to-life), vivid (enhanced for higher saturation), and professional (suitable for tuning for color-accurate displays). But you can also fine-tune the RGB values – as well as other settings like brightness, contrast, and tint (cool, warm, or a color) – to give you maximum control. The default Vivid setting is best for day-to-day usage, and the colors are fairly balanced to begin with – so very little, if any, tinkering is required. Other settings that you can activate are an eBook mode for a grayscale rendering that's easier on the eyes, as well as AI-powered Super Dynamic Display and Vivid Display, which collectively boost brightness and contrast while helping colors pop a little more.

The screen is dazzling, by the way, with a brilliant maximum brightness of 808nits – although Honor suggests the device can reach a maximum of 8,000nits under certain conditions. There's also Sunlight Mode that can stretch brightness levels – as well as automatic controls that let the phone configure brightness depending on the room you're in. Despite recording fantastic brightness levels with our colorimeter, it was a tad dimmer than the Honor 600's 855nits, although it did outshine the Magic8 Pro's 790 nits (with a peak of 6,000nits).

We must also point out the outstanding color accuracy scores, with 99.9% coverage of the sRGB spectrum (beating the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra), alongside 79.8% coverage of the Adobe RGB spectrum and 92.9% coverage of the DCI P3 spectrum. These are clear of the 70% and 80% required for professional use and slightly higher than the results we registered with the Magic8 Pro.

Honor 600 Pro: Specs and performance

The Honor 600 Pro is fitted with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite. This differs from the 8 Elite Gen 5 fitted into the very newest flagship phones, and is actually the chip that featured in many of 2025's flagships including the S25 Ultra. Honor has paired this with an Adreno 830 GPU (again, slightly weaker versus this year's 840), and you also get a flagship-grade 12GB RAM with 512GB storage.

This is a compelling package that offers almost double the power of the standard Honor 600. We registered 2,933 in single-core testing with Geekbench 6 and 8,738 in multi-core benchmarking, versus the Honor 600's 1,316 and 4,075.

The likes of the S26 Ultra and Magic8 Pro are 50% faster than this yet (we scored 3,671 and 10,722 in the latter, for example), but it suggests you should be comparing its performance with last year's flagships more than this year's mid-budget devices. Interestingly, the iPhone 17 Pro scored 3,778 and 9,816 – so the Honor 600 Pro isn't far away on multi-threaded performance. It's also around the score you'd expect from a mid-range laptop.

The battery life was a little disappointing, by contrast. While 27hrs and 3mins is nothing to be scoffed at, the 6,400mAh battery doesn't last as long as the 7,000mAh battery in the standard 600 – with a stonking lifespan of 36hrs and 12mins. Sitting between these devices is the 31hrs and 42mins the Magic8 Pro lasted. You do, however, get 80W wired and 50W wireless charging – much better than the S26 Ultra's 60W and 25W, but not as good as the Magic8 Pro's 100W and 80W.

Honor 600 Pro: Cameras

The cameras include a front-facing 50MP lens alongside a rear-facing trio of a 50MP periscope telephoto lens, 12MP 112° ultra-wide lens, and 200MP ultra-clear AI main camera lens. This is one more than in the standard 600, and a set of lenses that come close to competing with the Honor Magic8 Pro's incredible setup.

This overall configuration gives you a little more oomph than the standard Honor 600, which excels at point-and-click shooting, with up to 3.5x optical zoom and staggering 120x digital zoom. As with its flagship cousin, you also enjoy CIPA 6.5-stop image stabilization, which is excellent when shooting images or film. The AI-powered Magic Color mode also gives you AI-generated filters if you want to get creative with your photography.

Shooting with video is also excellent, and you can capture 4K footage at up to 60fps and 3.5x zoom, and up to 30fps with 1x zoom using the front camera. There's also a handy Night Video X, which lets you capture footage at 1080p up to 24fps and 2x zoom. Other useful features are an AI button that doubles as a way to zoom if you slide your finger up and down (or click to capture).

Honor 600 Pro: Features and software

With MagicOS 10, powered by Android 16, you ironically get a very iOS-like experience, considering how closely this device resembles Apple's flagship 'pro' smartphone. Unlike this operating system, however, there's so much room to customize it to suit your tastes and preferences, with most of these options overwhelming at first.

On the downside, there are a handful of AI-ready features that feel forced rather than genuinely useful. This is no sin that Honor alone is guilty of, but technology companies the world over are contending with stuffing every new device with as much AI as possible to prove its utility. That said, some are pretty handy.

Downloading a large language model (LLM) allows you to run AI Deepfake & Voice Cloning Detection. This scans video feeds in apps like Google Meet to detect whether you've head-to-head with a deepfake. AI Space also might be useful for those coordinating devices in a smart office. Also, a great tool is the automated transcription feature in the Recorder app.

Less useful is the AI folder on the home screen – which is populated with random apps depending on what you're most likely to use – and Honor AI, which deploys so-called "agents" onto your device to optimize it. We didn't find this feature particularly helpful, with the AI Memories agent, in particular, promising the most and failing to deliver (it's simply another way to manage your screenshots). Although it does come with a handy three-finger-swipe gesture if you can't gel with the conventional physical button combination.

Magic Portal, finally, is another somewhat useful feature that lets you tap into "AI memories" (read: screenshots) to search Google for elements of what's on screen. All you need to do is circle a portion of the screen, and the AI will do its magic. If you're also struggling with drafting documents, AI Writing can help you improve your phrasing and writing style.

The device itself only has room for one physical SIM card and an eSIM. It also ships with a 24-month warranty, including six months of coverage for the charger and removable battery and three months for accessories. This comes alongside seven years of Android maintenance, but there are no specific security-centric plans as you may get with Samsung's Knox Suite Enterprise Plan.

Honor 600 Pro: Is it worth it?

The more time we spent with the Honor 600 Pro, the more value we saw in what it could offer against the broader competition. If you're in the mood for a premium device, but aren't willing to shell out the asking price, a common practice is to look at last year's flagships. Unlike many mid-range or flagship smartphones, the Honor 600 Pro is something in a league of its own – unless you compare it with last year's flagship market.

This smartphone is a device that performs just as well as 2025's best options while also benefiting from a brilliant and color-accurate display, a fantastic iPhone-esque design (with more robust protections), as well as a set of camera lenses on par with the S26 Ultra. For £899, it's also much cheaper than last year's flagship smartphones (somehow) and feels just as fresh as the latest high-end devices launched today.

Sure, there are some bugbears. For instance, its aggressively rounded displays often feel like content is cut off. The battery life is weaker than its counterparts, too. Finally, you don't get some of the most up-to-date display standards (like HDR10+), but there's still plenty here to justify the price tag and a host of new-era AI features that may occasionally offer some use. Overall, for a device that aims to please everyone, it succeeds in many ways.

Honor Magic8 Pro specifications